Games for the weekend: The Room

Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend.

The Room ($1.99 iPad, Free iPhone) is a mysterious puzzle game that will have you swiping, tapping and pinching your screen until you scream in torment. When you finally see the solution to unlock a secret panel and click, the next clue is revealed.

To play The Room you must be a keen observer. All of the clues you need to solve each puzzle are right in front of you. Or at least they will be right in front of you as soon as you twist, pinch and zoom the screen to rotate the object you are looking at into the right position. The first level starts off introducing you to the a puzzle box centered on a table in the middle of the room. Navigating around the puzzle box, you start to see irregularities, bumps, hidden panels, and even clues. You start to teach yourself what to look for and whenever you think you have found something, you start to tap, swipe and pinch at the screen.

Keeping things moving along in the game, there are written messages that not only help you solve the current puzzle, but also reveal an ongoing story line that gets more interesting the further you get in the game. When things seem to grind to a halt and you simply cannot figure out which way to go next, a little question mark appears in the upper right corner of the screen. Tapping on it will present a subtle clue that will get you back on the right track. Remain stuck a little longer and a second more obvious clue will be made available.

As you make your way through the game, you will collect various artifacts that will be used to solve the puzzle in front of you. A key, a wrench, a pice of cotton; you would be surprised what sort of objects can be used to unlock each puzzle box. The variation and oddity of each item you collect adds to the mysterious nature of the game. Often times you figure out where the mysterious puzzle pieces go before you find them. You will see an oddly shaped keyhole that you know a special key will fit into, but you don’t have the key.

One of the items you find along the way is an eyepiece. At first it does not work, but you soon find the lens. With this eyepiece you can look at the puzzle in a different dimension, a mystical dimension. You will see hidden clues and markings glowing on objects that are not visible under normal lighting conditions. There are even times when you also need to look at an object from a different perspective and line up the hidden markings in a specific way. While the eyepiece may show you four distinctive straight lines, you may need to move things around until each of the lines align themselves to form into the shape of an “X” to mark the spot.

Just when you feel that you are getting the hang of things and are moving along at a fairly good rate, you are stopped dead in your tracks. Nothing you do seems to work. The clues tell you to tilt the device and you proceed to swipe the 3D object, moving it all around within the game. But the solution, again, is right in your hands.

Being one of the App Stores most award-winning games, if you haven’t played The Room yet then you are officially being sent to your room this weekend to give it a try. And if you have already played The Room you are still being sent to your room to play the new puzzles introduced just this week via a free update to the game titled Epilogue. There are now additional puzzles to be solved in this free update that serve to keep you busy as Fireproof Games finishes its sequel, The Room Two, due out later this year.